Thursday, March 26, 2020

The joy of quantum computation

As I’ve said in dozens of my talks, the application of QC that brings me the most joy is refuting Gil Kalai, Leonid Levin, and all the others who said that quantum speedups were impossible in our world.

Okay, quantum computers have the potential of proving us QC skeptics wrong. Is that what he is saying?

If he had already proved us wrong, then he would presumably say so, and celebrate his joy.

He has already endorsed Google claim of "quantum supremacy", but he uses the term "quantum speedups here. The Google computation was not really a speedup of anything, so I guess he is admitting that no quantum speedups have been achieved.

The Google computation was one that would be hard to simulate on a Turing computer. I don't think anyone denied that some quantum experiments could be hard to simulate. The question is whether some quantum computer can get some huge speedup in solving some problem, over what a Turing computer can do.

When Google or someone else demonstrates a quantum speedup, I will be glad to bring Scott the joy of being right about it.